


hearts aren't made of glass, they're made of muscle and blood and something else

by breathesthebest



Category: 13 Reasons Why (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Clay/Justin slow burn, Combo road trip/gutter punk AU?, Found Family, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hannah Baker (sort of), Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, M/M, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-25
Updated: 2019-11-08
Packaged: 2020-12-28 20:11:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 15,646
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21142505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathesthebest/pseuds/breathesthebest
Summary: Maybe they're all running from something intangible.(Clay is seeing things. He meets a strange group of runaways, and they make their way up the coast.)





	1. I. oakland

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back already with a new series because I guess I'm really into writing these days? I’ve had this AU story stuck in my head for a while. Some events/elements are consistent with the series, and some are entirely different, but I tried very hard to keep everyone in character. It’ll probably be about six chapters of varying lengths. The Clay/Justin is slow burn and not likely to be very explicit, if that's not a pairing you go for. Tags will probably change as it progresses or be listed in chapter descriptions, so please keep an eye out for CWs! Title from [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNo5mVzmFtw) song. Not beta'd. Really hope you enjoy. <3

Clay is gone before his parents wake.

As Crestmont fades in the window to the hum of the bus engine, a sense of calm washes over him. It will take him as far as Oakland. He’ll figure out the rest from there; maybe travel inland to Nevada, or south to Los Angeles. The “where” isn’t important. What matters is getting _ away. _

Hannah watches him across the aisle. Every feature in hyperfocus, too lifelike and not lifelike enough. Her eyes are just as he’d remembered them; bright blue and quick.

“Running isn’t going to get rid of me, you know,” she says, and he does know. But he has to try. And if she couldn't stay, maybe it makes sense that he can't either.

The bus isn't a bathtub. It sighs, climbing onto the still-dark highway and over the tall bridge at the town’s edge. Quiet clusters of homes stretch out for miles, small and nameless before the vast face of the ocean. For the first time in what feels like months, Clay closes his eyes.

This is what happened: Jeff died on a Saturday night, and Hannah followed twelve days later. The "how" isn't important. The problem is they hadn’t stayed dead for very long. 

\------------

He leaves a note, at least. 

_ I can’t stay here. I’m safe. Please don’t worry, I’ll come home when I’m ready, _and Hannah waiting patiently by the windowsill, her hair as long as it had been the day they met. She came back six days ago. 

“I left a note, too. Do you want to know what it said?”

Clay has five voicemails. Had listened to them over and over and then, after the wake, she’d appeared. Like a game of Bloody Mary. _ Please pick up. I’m scared. I'm so sorry. _This was before her mother found her in the bathroom. He remembers arriving at the house that night, breathless, and seeing the bright lights of the ambulances as they carried her out. He couldn't see her through the bag. Irrationally, he'd wondered if it was really her inside at all. 

He knows better than to ask about the note; she won’t answer his questions because she can’t. The funny thing about losing his mind is that he is aware that it’s happening; knows she’s real just as much as he knows that she isn’t_. _

At night, in dreams, he sees Jeff. He doesn't speak because his face is disfigured and flecked with glass, eyes closed, blood on the seat and the dashboard. In these dreams Clay is always frozen. He can only stand there in front of the car door, listening to the distant wail of sirens that never get closer.

He leaves a note because his parents won’t understand, and because they will understand even less if he stays. He'd listened to his mother scheduling the psychiatric evaluation on the phone. After the third night Clay woke up screaming, after his father heard him pleading with Hannah to _ leave. _It had been easy to wait up for the light beneath their bedroom door to go out, to sneak into the garage for a dusty hiking pack and sleeping bag, to walk the five miles to the bus depot in the dark.

It had been easy, too, to leave his phone. To shove it deep beneath mattress where his parents won’t find it, where he can’t replay the last real words she ever said to him or to anybody else.

\------------

Mrs. Baker hadn’t cried at the wake. Not like Mrs. Atkins, who had wept with her entire body. She just stared, unmoving, into the unsteady progression of people dressed in black.

There hadn’t been any warning—that’s what everybody said. At school and even there, in the home where it happened, speaking in hushed tones. Clay knew better. He'd wondered if Mrs. Baker knew it, too. She must have heard the voicemails. 

_ I’m sorry about our stupid fight. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you what I was planning to do. I’m sorry about Jeff. It’s my fault, and I can’t stay. I love you. _

That had been before. Before, when Clay put his phone on silent and told himself he’d deal with her tomorrow. 

There is another version of _ before_. Another world he sees at night when he tries to sleep and in the morning when he tries to wake: in this before, he drives home from the party with Jeff. He sees the lights speeding toward the intersection and shouts and Jeff never puts his foot on the gas pedal. Hannah never has to call the cops too late. And in this world he realizes she’s hurting, realizes it a long time ago, and he does something. _ Fixes _ her.

At the wake, Mrs. Baker’s gaze shifted to meet his. Then her eyes had widened in vague recognition, even all the way across the room, and they were the same color as Hannah’s. Bright blue and quick.

Clay ran. Had clambered onto his bike and pedaled as fast as his legs could carry him home, and when he got there she was waiting.

“Missed you, Helmet.”

\------------

He awakens to the bus driver shaking him. This is just before everything sort of falls apart.

“Come on, kid, up and out. We’re here.” 

Clay blinks away disorientation. Hannah is gone; only rows of empty seats. He collects his backpack with clumsy, groggy hands. The front pouch is open. Stares into it for a beat, then two, before he realizes his wallet isn’t inside. There's a frenzied moment of searching, unzipping each compartment to find nothing. 

“My wallet’s gone,” he declares numbly.

“Can't help you. No accounting for other riders,” the man says. “But like I said, you gotta get off the bus. I have passengers who need to board.”

The worn carpet floor beneath the seat offers up nothing but lint. He stands, mind racing as he stumbles out into the lot of the station. There is $100 in cash in his pocket. How far will that take him? And when he gets there, where will he stay? It’s now that the weight of his decision rolls over him in a dizzy, cold sweat. No wallet, no I.D., no debit card. His parents are awake now. Maybe they’re just finding the note. Maybe they’re just sitting down to breakfast, wondering when he'll come down. 

“They know you’ve lost it. They’ll take you to a shrink, and then you’ll have to tell them about me,” Hannah says, appearing at his side. “They’ll make you tell them about how you let me die.”

Clay looks away, looks at anything but her. Passengers mill around in lines with luggage. He can hear traffic beyond the walls of the lot, see the tips of tall buildings. Grits his teeth and tries to remind himself that this is what he wanted: somewhere else, anywhere else. The plan had just been to get away. It's a start; he'll figure it out.

A heavyset security guard approaches him with a soft smile. “You have to keep it moving unless you’re waiting to board, baby,” she says gently, like she can tell he’s on the verge of a panic attack.

He realizes with a mute dread that he has never really been on his own. Not in a way that counts. Had traveled alone just once to visit his grandparents in Florida, but there had been a home and hot food waiting on the other side. 

Outside of the station gates, the streets of Oakland hum with activity. It’s as foreign as anywhere else he’s never been. Of course he hadn’t planned for this—hadn’t even known where he was headed next. He doesn’t even have a fucking phone.

Hannah squints into the mid-morning sun. “Well. You can’t turn back now, can you?”

\------------

Unmoored, Clay walks. Then he walks some more.

If only to move, to try to _ think_. Drifts through a small district of shops and restaurants, pack heavy on his back, until he reaches the foot of a large grassy park. Every step feels like an admission of defeat. He’s only been gone for a few hours and already his bid to escape is over, fizzled out. He’ll have to use the last of his cash to get home. His parents, alarmed, will take him to Dr. Ellman. Then everything will come out, everything will _ happen,_ and it doesn't bear thinking about.

The sun in the city is warmer than at home and the concrete cooks the air. He settles on a bench beneath a tree as exhaustion returns to the corners of his vision. _ Just a few more hours, at least. _ Away from Crestmont, from the before and the after and everything else_. _Clay pulls his knees up and pillows his head on his backpack.

“Get some sleep. Then you’ll know what to do,” Hannah says softly, standing before him with her arms wrapped in bright white bandages. She’s the last thing he sees before he closes his eyes.

\------------

“Come on. Wake up, you.” 

_ Please pick up. Please pick up. _

“I said _ wake up._” It isn’t her—the syllables and cadence are all wrong. Clay opens his eyes to a girl he’s never seen before.

His breath still comes in short gasps as he jerks to sit up, clutching the backpack to his chest. Then there's the hard wood of the bench and the sounds of the city and he remembers where he is.

“Hey, calm down,” the girl says. There’s metal wire in her hair; delicate coils of bronze and gold. “I’m doing you a favor. Cops are doing a vagrant sweep of the park. They won’t let you sleep here.”

The sun is still high in the sky, which means he hasn’t been out for long. Twenty or thirty minutes. The girl looks at him with catlike, expectant eyes.

“I’m not a vagrant. I’m traveling,” he says slowly, and realizes right away that it isn’t true—that he’s far from home with no money and nowhere to go, and still so fucking tired. Any police will inevitably ask to see identification, of which he now has none. 

“Could’ve fooled me. You look pretty rough,” she replies with a finely arched eyebrow. “Anyways, go to a hotel or something. If you stay here they’ll probably harass you.”

He rubs at his eyes. “I just—I was just trying to sleep. Before I figure out where I’m going. Somebody stole my wallet." Clay doesn't know why he's telling her, what he thinks it will accomplish, feeling pathetic as soon as it leaves his mouth.

Sure enough, a pair of policemen lean down to peer into a patch of bushes at the end of the pathway. A group of women doing yoga gawk as they rouse a thin, dirty old man on a piece of flattened cardboard. Were there homeless people in Crestmont? If there were, he'd never seen any. Maybe this is where they all go.

The girl glances at the cops, and then at Clay, and sighs. “Fine. I’ll help you out, but only because you clearly need it. Come on.”

He stares up at her with a puzzled frown. “I don’t even know your name. Help me how?”

“I'm Jess,” she says simply. “We’ve got a place not far from here. I’m trying to be _ nice_, but you can take it or leave it.” She’s beautiful, he realizes, in an inscrutable and effortless way. Clad in a grey shirt and red flannel with challenging eyes that are familiar, somehow.

“She reminds you of me,” Hannah remarks from the seat beside him. “Maybe it’s a sign. Follow or go home? _ Lady or tiger?” _

“Clay,” he says, and stands.

\------------

They walk for about twenty minutes, and he ignores Hannah’s shadow as it bobs in his peripheral vision. The landscape shifts into an old warehouse district; fewer modular apartment complexes and cafes and banks. It doesn’t feel _ safe_, not like the suburbs of Crestmont, but it doesn’t feel unsafe either. Kids at school had always talked about Oakland like it was a shithole. He half-remembers news reports on crime statistics and feels increasingly out of his depth.

“Just around the corner,” the girl from the park—Jess—tells him. “It’s not the Ritz, but it’s free. You can sleep there if you want to. We should have some food, too.”

They come to a stop at a dilapidated building behind a shuttered auto parts shop. It looks like it could have been a small factory, once; dirty brick with tall boarded up windows, a long yard along the alley side sectioned off by a high slab wall. At the end, a door lined with chain link tarpaulin-backed fencing. Discarded trash dots the gutters and street, nobody around but the two of them.

Clay hangs back as she jimmies the gate open. There’s no way the place is structurally sound, no way anyone even _ lives _here. It certainly isn’t a legal residence.

“Maybe she’s trying to steal the rest of your cash. Plotting to take you into that yard and stab you in the neck to leave you for dead,” Hannah chimes in helpfully from the foot of a rickety fire escape. She's chattier now that he doesn't talk to her.

“Quit making that face. It looks like crap from the street, but it’s not that bad,” Jess says. “Are you hungry or not?”

And Clay _ is _ hungry. He tries to remember the last time he ate. It had been stupid not to bring any food, but he also hadn’t counted on his wallet being stolen. So, against every inch of better judgement, he follows. Has to shift sideways to shimmy through the narrow entryway of the pried-open door, and then he's on the other side.

It’s not at all what he’d expected. In stark contrast to the exterior, the courtyard is completely cocooned in a lush overgrowth of plants and vines. It feels almost like a jungle, like another world. There’s a rusted table and metal folding chairs beneath a tree that dapples the sunlight, a row of long-abandoned planters bursting with succulents and weeds.

“Nice, right? This way,” Jess calls. She’s already straddling an opened ground-level window, waving him over.

He shrugs away the sense of disorientation and pulls himself up to the window ledge. Climbs over and through on unsteady feet to find himself in a large room. It’s dusty and full of natural light from the windows that face the yard. Tall ceilings, layers of graffiti lining walls flanked by an assortment of junk furniture scattered around; a folding table, a ratty armchair, a footstool.

Clay is startled by a shuffling sound. He notices two men—young, roughly his own age—sitting on a bank of sleeping bags to his right. They look like they're playing cards.

“Company,” Jess announces, leaning against a support beam. “His name’s Clay. I promised to feed him. He was sleeping in the park like a lost puppy.”

“Hey," the pale gangly boy with the shaved head raises a hand in a small wave. There’s a film camera at his hip. 

“You’ve got to stop bringing in strays, Jess,” the other boy says with eyes narrowed beneath a mess of unruly brown hair. His clothes are more ragged than the other’s, denim ripped at the knees and a threadbare black t-shirt, but his face bears a conventional handsomeness that seems out of place.

“Tyler worked out fine,” Jess shrugs.

“Tyler wasn’t a total greenhorn,” the boy counters. Gestures at Clay and says, “Look at him. Kid is fresh off the bus.”

“I’m Tyler,” the camera kid supplies timidly. Clay shoots him an awkward, tight-lipped smile. 

He watches as Jess crosses the room to root around in a duffel bag. Calls over her shoulder, “Ty’s an amazing artist. He’s mostly out here to take pictures, I think. And he _ really _knows trains.” Clay isn’t sure why that part matters, but he doesn’t ask. Just shuffles from foot to aching foot, stomach raw with hunger. The unnamed boy doesn’t break his wary stare.

“Here, how’s this?” She holds out an orange, a saran-wrapped muffin, and a bottle of water. Motions him over to sit on one of the sleeping bags and he obliges quickly, nearly tripping over a scatter of half-melted candles in the process. The muffin is a little stale but it doesn’t matter; he finishes it in about 20 seconds before he starts on the orange. 

“Shit, you are hungry,” the other boy says.

“This is Justin, by the way. He’s not usually this grumpy”—Jess flicks his shoulder—“but he’s just afraid you’re going to blow up the spot.”

Clay swallows, takes a sip of water. "Blow up...?”

“She means do something that gets the cops sniffing around,” Justin explains curtly, “and get us all kicked out of the squat.”

“Oh. Right,” With the hunger pangs gone and his stomach full, the bone-deep exhaustion catches up to him with a vengeance. He rubs at heavy eyelids. ”What’s—uh, what’s a squat?”

“Abandoned building that we’re living in, for now,” Jess responds. She ignores Justin’s irritated grumble. “Don’t worry about Justy. Stay as long as you want—it’s not like we own the place. You can sleep if you want to."

“Thank you,” he mumbles, because that’s all he has to hear. He’s tired, so tired, and the dusty padded fabric feels like a five star hotel bed when he curls up into it. 

The last thing he sees before he falls asleep is Justin's scrutinizing stare. In the light his eyes are almost the same color as Hannah’s.

\------------

It’s just after sunrise when Clay wakes to a scuffed combat boot nudging him in the side. 

He blinks back sleep and pulls himself to a seated position, batting the shoe away. The brunette kid—Justin—is crouched in front of him. He leans back on the balls of his heels with an amused expression.

“Good morning, Claypot,” he stage whispers. Jess and what he assumes is Tyler are two lumps in the nearby sleeping bags.

“Not my name,” he grumbles.

“You’ve been passed out for, like, 12 hours. Time to make yourself useful. You’re coming with me.”

Clay frowns. “What? _ Where?” _

The Jess-shaped sleeping bag stirs. “Bring caaaaarbs.”

Justin just shrugs on a worn denim jacket and grins. “You’ll see.”

\------------

It’s still a little dark when they slip out through the courtyard and make their way to a busier street. Quiet with only a few cars, people on their way to work. Justin casts a toothy grin at a woman walking her baby in a stroller. 

“People like smiley hobos,” the taller boy explains, “puts them at ease.” But Justin looks less like a hobo than he does some sort of antiquated street urchin, striding confidently like he owns the place. He’s skinny with a frame it doesn’t fit right on, all sharp angles, more underfed than naturally lithe. 

Clay struggles to keep up. He tries not to think of his parents, waking up to their second day waking up without him. He knows they're scared, knows it’s probably driving them crazy—that he’s eighteen, a legal adult, free to leave if he chooses. It’s too late to go back_. _

“How long have you been doing this?” he asks to push the thoughts away. “The whole... abandoned building thing.”

Justin shrugs and casts a circumspect glance over his shoulder. “Long enough,” he replies. Hannah follows them a few paces back but remains mercifully quiet.

They walk in silence for a few minutes before coming to a stop at the end of a wide alley. There's a faintly salty scent to the air. Probably not far from the bay, Clay thinks. It’s a part of town that bears the earmarks of unsteady gentrification; ratty bodegas butting up against trendy cafes, brand new municipal trash cans on every corner. Justin leads him to the foot of a massive rusted dumpster. He slaps the metal with an easy grin.

“Pretty sure they just did inventory. Should be a four course meal in this one alone.” Then he hooks his palms on the lip of the bin, scurrying up and over in one almost graceful motion.

“You—you’re getting food from there?” Clay splutters, glancing around. Is this illegal? It seems illegal.

Justin leans over the edge of the dumpster and laughs. “You wanna wait around in a mile-long line with all the homebums for the soup kitchen?” he asks. “There’s a lot of good shit in here. They throw it out because it’s a day over expiration, or it’s ugly, or whatever, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Trust me, I know how to spot spoiled food.”

His head disappears and Clay grimaces, at a loss. “Well, have fun. I’m not eating it.”

Another laugh echoes out. “You ate it yesterday. Catch!”

Clay doesn’t have time to feel queasy because a bag of clementines comes flying over the edge—he barely catches it before a wrapped loaf of rye sails out, then a dented cantaloupe. Hannah laughs, loud as a bell, as she watches him scramble to collect the food. He tries to ignore her.

Justin hops out with a plastic bag of wrapped goat cheese logs and two glass jars of jam. “I love these fancy supermarkets. They throw anything out. We came at the right time—this stuff's still cold.”

Clay inspects the food as they shove it into their backpacks with a tight lipped frown. The sun is completely risen, warming the street, and he takes off his hoodie. 

“Hey,” Justin says suddenly, “wanna have a picnic? I know a cool place.”

The alley is empty and Hannah is gone. Not wanting to give her time to reappear, he nods. “Yeah. Sure. Whatever.”

It’s not like he has anywhere to be.

\------------

_A cool_ _place _turns out to mean _walking through half of Oakland. _Clay bites back his complaints. It’s been a long time since the orange and the muffin, and the hunger gnawing at his stomach makes the dumpster food more appealing with every block.

They snake through side streets until the smell of the bay is strong, Justin talking at him the whole way. He chatters about the place that has _ really good basement shows, _ the community center with a _ super hot reception desk lady. _ Easy to tune out. Clay won’t be here for long.

A group of young men call them over beneath an overpass, perched on plastic crates with a few road bikes scattered around. Their jackets are covered in safety pins and patches but their shoes are decidedly well cared for—probably not squatters. Garden variety wannabe punks, maybe. It quickly becomes clear that Justin knows them as they exchange greetings, but Clay hangs back anyway.

“Who’s this?” A boy with black hair and smudged eyeliner gestures at him with raised eyebrows. He looks like something out of _Sid and Nancy. _

“One of Jess’s oogles. He’s not bad,” Justin says, good natured. He leans forward to take a drag off of something—either a joint or a rolled cigarette, but likely the former—proffered by a baby-faced kid in a beanie.

“My name is Clay, actually,” he scowls. The guy reaches out and shakes his hand.

“Cyrus. Hey, you guys still in that squat on Magnolia?”

“For now,” Justin shrugs, adjusting his backpack. “We’re splitting for Portland pretty soon though. You know Decaf? Jess says he has really good thing going. A permanent set-up.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that. Be safe getting out there. You better still be in town for the show on Friday, though.”

“Of course—couldn’t let the newbie miss that,” Justin says. He hooks an arm around Clay’s shoulders, ruffling his hair before he frees himself with an emphatic glare.

“Nice. Then I’ll see you.” They grin and bump fists and, just like that, Justin’s leads him along again.

“Who were they?” Clay asks.

“Friends from around. Cyrus is a good guy. I once saw him roundhouse kick a Nazi punk so hard the guy lost, like, two teeth. Anyway, they're all in this band called Troll Barbie and their music sounds like ass."

“Troll Barbie. Points for creativity,” Clay deadpans. At least Justin’s in a better mood than he’d been in yesterday. The longer they all let him stay, the longer he doesn’t have to think about going home. He decides not to ask about Portland; with no car and no money, it seems unlikely that they're going anywhere anytime soon.

The city opens up on the other side of the overpass to the wide sky of an industrial zone. They hop a low concrete barrier into a long park that snakes along the edge of the harbor. A line of white cranes dot one end of the horizon over a massive yard of colorful shipping containers. The water glitters in the early afternoon sun with the Bay Bridge visible across it, a hulk of arching gray metal with the San Francisco skyline beyond. Justin collapses unceremoniously onto a stretch of grass. He rummages in his backpack and pulls out the bag of rye slices.

Clay sits too, glad to rest his legs. “It’s a nice view,” he admits. 

“Yeah, I love it here,” Justin leans back, propped up on a bony elbow. He uses a pocket knife to smear goat cheese on a slice of bread, covers it with a liberal drizzle of honey, and waves it in front of Clay's face. “Come on, you know you wanna try it.”

He bats at the other boy's arm but accepts it and takes a hesitant bite. The textures and flavors melt pleasantly in his mouth, delicious enough that for a second he forgets where it came from. He's loath to admit that it doesn't taste stale or rotten at all, and shuts up as Justin prepares another slice. The situation is absurd, _ feels _ absurd. He’s on his second day in a city he’s never been to before, homeless, eating trash food with a street kid. It doesn’t quite feel real; like Crestmont and everything else is far off, suspended somewhere in time. 

They eat wordlessly for a while. It’s Clay who breaks the silence, becoming resigned to sounding like a sheltered dumbass. “What’s an oogle?”

“Huh?”

“An oogle. What you called me before.”

"Oh," Justin says with this infuriating grin, wiping his mouth on the sleeve of his t-shirt, “that's what you are.”

When it becomes clear he isn’t going to elaborate, Clay rolls his eyes. “Okay. Whatever.”

He thinks he sees Hannah walking past, heart pounding in that split second, but it’s only a woman jogging.

\------------

Clay stays. 

Mostly because there’s nowhere else for him to go that isn’t home, which is an impossibility. He just doesn’t think about it. The weather is temperate enough that the building is _ vaguely _ habitable; the hard part is literally everything else. The logistics of daily life without an actual home are, it turns out, a pain in the ass. It takes a few days for Clay to get used to slipping over to the cafe to use the bathroom. By day three, he's even come to accept most of the food they bring back as semi-safely edible. 

It's Tyler who leads him through the rough education on personal grooming. Honest-to-god hot showers, he learns, are to be had at the local YMCA on Sundays, Tuesdays, and Fridays—when one of Cyrus’ friends works the front desk. He lets them go through the lost and found bin for forgotten shampoo bottles and cans of shaving cream. (And yes, Clay's glad he’d had the foresight to bring his own deodorant and razors.) When they need to, they wash their laundry by hand via large plastic tub in the squat courtyard, hanging it to dry. Considerably less quaint when he finds two dead bugs stuck to one of his t-shirts. It’s almost like camping, he tells himself, which makes it suck slightly less.

What he hadn’t counted on was the strangeness and occasionally _boredom _of having absolutely no obligations. In Crestmont there had been school, homework, and a job at the theater to keep him busy. Not having anything to do is dangerous. It’s room for Hannah to rear her head; sometimes just sitting and watching him, sometimes talking, and sometimes just stuck in his head repeating her own voicemails on loop. _ I’m sorry. It's not your fault._

So he keeps himself busy in the following week, forms a strange new routine. Follows Tyler around the city while he takes pictures for hours on end. Eventually, miraculously, his feet adjust to all the walking. They venture far; sneaking onto the ferry to San Francisco, or well into the suburbs, or into the rail yards Tyler seems to have a special affinity for. Most of these excursions are punctuated by companionable silence. Clay doesn’t mind; he usually comes back exhausted enough to sleep dreamlessly. 

He learns that Tyler has been taking pictures his whole life. He keeps a waterproof box filled with hundreds of film photographs and another packed with negatives in his backpack. They’re beautiful: candid portraits, strange corners of the city, abandoned buildings, the blurred faces of strangers passing on the street. There are pictures of Jess and Justin, too, and of someone he’s pretty sure is Cyrus trying to do tricks on a bike. All shot in black and white, his work skirts the line of fine art and a kind of fringe journalism. It makes sense. Tyler seems to take to Clay right away but he’s awkward, shy. The camera is like a barrier between him and the rest of the world, and he never slouches when he holds it up to peer through the viewfinder.

Sometimes Clay goes with Jess to the public library, where she spends time doing remote work—something to do with copywriting. Explains that while it doesn’t pay well, it's enough to afford toiletries, water, and hot food when they really want it. Occasionally she reads for hours on end, plowing through a never ending list of non-fiction. He quickly learns that she is uncompromisingly political, given to surprisingly eloquent screeds about everything from gender and race to class and ecological justice. She fills his head with names and dates he quickly forgets, but it's nice to listen to someone care about something.

Clay mostly kills time studying for the SAT test he should be taking in a few weeks. It seems sensible, even if he won't be home to take it. While Jess works, he uses the library computers to send the occasional brief email to his parents. (_I’m okay. Don’t be worried. I’m safe but I’m not ready to come home yet.) _ Cowardly, he leaves their responses unread.

Jess describes her upbringing as a long series of Air Force bases that ended on a sunny afternoon in Nevada, when she left on her eighteenth birthday. “It’s not really _seeing the country_ if you have overbearing parents who keep you under lock and key,” she says. Frames the choice to pick up and leave as a political decision, a bid to experience complete freedom—but for all that Jess is principled and fiercely independent, there is an underlying edge of untruth to it. 

He knows better than to pry. It feels like an unspoken consensus: don't ask too many questions. All that matters is today, the liminal moment. Maybe they're all running from something intangible.

Justin is different and, sometimes, it feels as though he makes less sense with every interaction. He delights in Clay’s greenness, always eager to spell things out in as shocking or crass a way as possible. And if there’s anything to be said about him, it’s that he’s good at deflecting; can spin a personal question into a joke so skillfully it’s almost an art. Other times he’s mercurial, alternatively moody or jovial at the drop of a hat.

He comes and goes more than the others, too—even for entire days and nights at a time. One of Clay's first mistakes is asking Jess what his story is one afternoon, and she just laughs. 

“He’s a big dumb baby from somewhere out in the Midwest. If you want to open the rest of that can of worms, you can ask him yourself.” So that’s that.

At night they sit around a metal drum fire in the courtyard, eating or talking or just watching the flames flicker quietly. Sometimes Justin shows up with 40 ounce bottles of beer or whiskey handles, which Clay leaves alone, but they loosen Jess up enough to sing for them a few times. She has a beautiful voice with a soft, melancholic lilt. Folk songs she'd learned from her grandfather, the kind that tell stories; labor music and delta blues, _The Foggy Dew_ and _Which Side Are You On__._

It’s in those moments that Clay finds himself most at peace. When Hannah and the rest of the world falls away and it feels like this—whatever _ this _ is—will never end. Like nothing else is real but the dancing fire and the sound of Jess singing.

\------------

He doesn’t dream of Jeff this time.

Instead, it’s Hannah. He watches like a ghost as she cries in her bedroom and her shaking fingers dial his number. She'd hoped it would make it easier, but the half bottle of sleeping pills just makes her sluggish and scared. Clay is frozen as she leaves the first of the voicemails, knows every word by heart. 

When she goes into the bathroom he is forced to follow. The tub full, water steaming, and she climbs in wearing all of her clothes. He sees the glint of the razor. Clay’s heart thunders as she leaves the final message. He’d known she was in the bathroom the moment he first heard it; could hear the way her voice bounced off of the tile walls. Is this how it happened?

_ I’m so sorry, I can’t stay, please forgive me- _

Clay wakes with a gasp like he’s choking. His hands flail until he remembers where he is, trying to catch his breath, blinking wildly at the high ceiling. Everyone else is still asleep.

It’s colder than usual with a breeze coming in through one of the glassless windows. The moon is full and bright enough that it illuminates the room. He sits up to shrug on his hoodie and, giving up on the notion of getting any more sleep, slips out to the rusted fire escape. He climbs it quietly and carefully until he reaches the top.

The flat, enormous roof has become Clay’s favorite place to escape to at night. Its black tar surface retains the heat from the day and, from the northernmost edge, the lights of Oakland stretch out all the way to the water.

He’s surprised, then, to find he’s not alone; that there’s a person with their elbows on a rung of the railings, knees dangling over the edge. Realizes from the ratty jacket that it’s Justin. Then something else: a shuddery breath, almost like crying.

For a moment Clay considers creeping back down the fire escape. Not sure he’s ready to talk to someone else right now, not with the nightmare still clinging to him like static. But Justin looks up and spots him first, hurriedly swiping at his face with his sleeve. 

“Hey,” Clay mutters awkwardly. No making an exit now, so he shuffles over to sit by the edge. The roof is sturdy and so is the railing, but he makes sure not to look down anyways.

“Yo. Did the cold wake you up?” Justin asks. His voice is clear like he hadn’t just been crying, and maybe that had just been Clay’s imagination. He doesn’t seem like the kind of person who cries. Then again, Clay barely knows what kind of person he _ does _ seem like.

“Something like that,” he shrugs. 

“You talk in your sleep, you know. It’s pretty funny,” Justin smirks. As if to return to form, he leans over the railing and spits.

“I do?” Then, nervously, “Do I—what do I say?”

The other boy huffs a laugh. “Hell if I know. Bunch of nonsense mumbling.” Clay isn’t sure if he’s just saying that, feels unsteady thinking about it. 

“My name,” Hannah supplies somewhere behind him. “Or maybe Jeff’s. Or your mom and dad.” He doesn’t turn to look at her. If he focuses on something else, someone living, she’ll go away.

“Do you have anyone back home?” He asks, if only for something to say. “Parents or siblings or something?”

“Nope. Don’t have anything like that,” is Justin's short, firm answer. “Home is wherever I am.”

“That’s kind of cheesy.” Clay gets the sense he isn’t completely telling the truth, but lets it slide. 

“I guess I’m cheesy,” he grins. “What about you? Got anybody waiting up for you?”

He regrets asking. But it only seems fair to answer, now, so he admits, “My parents are probably freaking out. I’ve been letting them know I’m okay, emailing from the library every few days. Their responses are piling up, but—I can’t bring myself to read any of them.”

Justin nods. “That’s rough,” he murmurs.

“It’s fine.” They watch the city lights in silence for a moment, listening to the distant moan of semi-trailers on the highway.

“I never met my real dad,” Justin offers suddenly. “The only thing I know is that his name’s Wyatt and he rides a motorcycle. He's a traveler too. I'm gonna find him one of these days, though. I'll punch him in the nose and then we’ll split a bottle of whiskey.”

Clay studies his profile and tries to discern if it’s a joke. But Justin just stares out with this lopsided smile that says he means it, like it’s a story he’s told himself for a long time.

“Aren’t you telling yourself a story too?” Hannah’s voice cuts in beside him.

“Be quiet,” he snaps, forgetting himself. When he turns to look there’s nothing but dark and the far-off glimmer of car lights passing over the bridge.

“What? You’re the one who asked,” Justin huffs offendedly.

“No—not you.” Then, realizing how fucking crazy that sounds, “Never mind. Sorry. Still half asleep.”

The other boys just raises his eyebrows. “You’re really fucking weird."

"So I've been told."

"But I guess you're okay."

“Yeah, whatever. You too.”

Justin's smile is bright, and Clay realizes just how long it's been since he made someone smile like that. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Troll Barbie does, in fact, sound like ass. They make a hasty departure from Oakland. A gun is drawn.
> 
> If you enjoyed so far/have any feedback, please leave a comment! It means a lot to me. <3


	2. II. oakland, portland

Troll Barbie does, in fact, sound like ass.

That’s the first thing Clay becomes aware of when he steps into the crumbling little building at the edge of town. It also happens that there are at least sixty people who could care less, all crammed into the too-small venue with more energy than should even be allowed.

It’s like stepping into a sweaty furnace. There isn’t even a real stage;just the band playing at the front of the mass with the volume cranked up to ‘ear splitting’. Cyrus leads them on the mic in what sounds less like singing than it does very hoarse shouting of nearly indecipherable lyrics.

“This isn’t what I thought you guys meant when you said _ show_,” Clay yells over the music. Not that he’d expected something refined with a band name like ‘Troll Barbie’. Instead of a ticket-taker at the door, there had only been a surly boy in glasses handing out zines.

Jess laughs and shoves him playfully. Despite the setting, she looks immaculate: eyes done up in makeup he hadn’t even realized she had, hair in a messy ponytail. “You could try to loosen up for once,” she calls back, “or find Tyler! He’s taking pictures somewhere around here.”

Then she’s gone into the crowd after Justin, who’s already in the thick of it. Clay can just see him through the pack of people, wild, jumping along to what can only charitably be called a rhythm. He’s grinning ear to ear when their eyes meet, arm flailing wildly to beckon him in.

Clay doesn’t have the chance to deliberate. A small group of rowdy drunk kids knock into him on their way inside and, before he knows it, he’s sucked into the throng. The skinny girl on the drums sets the beat at a frenzied jackhammer and the crowd responds in kind, surging energetically. He’s pitched forward and then to the side before a hand—Justin’s—circles around his arm and pulls him out of the fray.

“Is this supposed to be fun?” Clay hollers, but the taller boy just beams harder. A bald man with at least 10 facial piercings stumbles into them and Justin shoves him away, laughing and breathless. 

“It is!” He yells in Clay’s ear, wrapping a sweaty arm around his shoulder. “C’mon, just—_move!”_

So, with little choice, Clay does. Lets himself be pushed and shoved with the swarm because at least Jess and Justin won’t let him get trampled. Probably. And there’s a group of girls who can’t be older than sixteen, all wild hair and artfully torn clothes, holding their own nearby—so it’s more of a matter of pride than anything else.

A new song begins; a little more melodic this time, the raucous moshing dulling just enough that he can try to listen. It isn’t _ good_. Definitely not anything like the music he listens to on his own, but maybe not abjectly awful. And as Clay closes his eyes and tries to bounce to the tune, he can almost get it. There’s a sense of release in the unrestrained chaos of this room, a blooming exhilaration in relinquishing control. Like being on a rollercoaster or jumping from a swing at the zenith.

He opens his eyes in time to see a beer bottle sail over the crowd. For a split horrified second he thinks it’s going to hit Jess—but it misses her, connecting solidly with the head of a burly guy covered in tattoos.

“Don’t throw shit, asshole!” Jess screams in the bottle’s direction. It hadn’t broken, but the guy clutches at his temple, and when his hand comes away it’s bloody. He shouts a string of drunken curses and laughs like it’s nothing. And maybe it is, but suddenly Clay can’t move, heart stopping as he watches blood runs down the man’s face. It’s bright red.

Then all he can see is Jeff: Jeff, mangled in the car, glass all around him and motionless. The music fades out until it’s just the scream of sirens. Clay is distantly aware of Justin’s muffled voice saying something but it doesn’t matter because already he’s stumbling away, shoving people aside, out of the crowd and into the venue’s long entrance hall. He braces himself on the flyer-covered wall with ambulance wail all around him. Finds a doorway and nearly trips through it into a small, disgusting bathroom.

Clay retches into the toilet. His whole body shakes as the image of Jeff fades only to be replaced with short, tight puffs of breath. His back connects with the concrete wall as he tries to suck in enough air. A dim pink light flickers overhead. It isn’t real; Jeff is gone. They cleaned him up, wiped away all the blood, and now he’s 30 miles away in a coffin in the ground.

The door creaks open and Justin peers in. “Shit,” Clay hears, followed by a shuffling and a click of the lock. He keeps his eyes squeezed shut, torso curled forward into his knees, and focuses on remembering how to breathe.

“Shit,” Justin mutters again. He flushes the toilet and then there’s the warmth of somebody close. “Hey, hey, come on—just breathe it out.”

His voice is low and soft, gentler than usual, and hand comes to rub his shoulder. The contact brings him back just a little, slows everything down in increments. After what feels like a long time, there’s only the sound of muted bass from the band outside and his own ragged panting.

“That’s it, man,” Justin encourages, “keep breathing. You got it. You’re not gonna die. Panic attack, right?”

Clay can’t respond, but he doesn’t have to. “Just listen to my voice. Okay? I used to get these. They fucking suck. The first time I thought I was having, like, a heart attack or something.”

He pauses for a moment, as though considering what to say. “I used to imagine the ocean, which helped even though I never saw it in person till I came out here. It’s really—I mean, you look out, and somewhere all the way across that water is Japan. Or China. It’s wild. I never really thought about how there’s a whole planet outside of this shitty country until I saw the ocean. I guess that’s kind of corny, or stupid, but I’m serious. I want to see the Atlantic ocean someday, too.”

He keeps going. Talks about things he wants to see (the pyramids in Egypt, a rainforest, “the country with all the tulips”) and what he imagines it’s like to fly in a plane, to look down at the clouds from above. With each word Clay’s heartbeat begins to settle. He listens and focuses on the weight of the hand at his back until his breathing evens out too, lungs expanding fully if a little unsteadily. 

He blinks his eyes open, finally, and sees Justin staring back at him with something that isn’t quite concern. Closer to devotion, somehow, even though they’ve known each other for less than two weeks.

“That guy’s alright,” he says. “Sometimes assholes throw bottles, but it was just a cut that bled a lot.”

It takes Clay a second to realize he’s talking about the man who was hit by the beer bottle. He can’t help but huff out a flat, mirthless laugh. “That’s not why I—“ he stops and takes another ragged breath. “It’s fine. This kind of thing just happens sometimes.”

If Justin knows it’s a lie he doesn’t say so. Instead he rises to his feet and hauls Clay up with a steadying hand. There’s a pound on the door and a muffled _ some people need to take a piss. _

“C’mon, let’s get the fuck out of here,” he says.

“We don’t have to go,” Clay mutters sheepishly, even though he doesn’t mean it. The panic attack has left him unstable on his feet and there’s no way he can go back out there, just the thought making him dizzy.

“We do, believe me. Cyrus’s band is done and the next one sucks even worse,” Justin says. An obvious out, but he’ll take it nonetheless. There’s another impatient bang on the door. “I told Jess we’d probably split, anyways. Let’s go.”

Clay follows him into the hall where a ginger girl with gauges the size of quarters gives them a dirty look. Justin pays her no mind, heading out of a back exit and into a quiet alley. 

The walk back to the squat is a solid two and a half miles. Clay lingers in the doorway and steels himself for the journey, trying to shake the last of the jitteriness out of his limbs. 

“Check it out!” Justin hollers a few yards away. He’s standing by a rack packed with bikes, pulling at the handlebars of one that’s clearly seen better days. “Our ride home. Toby left his shit unlocked.”

He swings a leg over the seat, looking pleased with himself, and rides it over. Clay raises an eyebrow. “We can’t just steal someone’s bike.”

“Hell yeah we can. Valuable lesson in bike theft prevention,” Justin grins. “Those guys are all middle class brats, they can afford an Uber. Besides, I’ll bring it back to him tomorrow. Or would you rather walk?”

He would not. Fatigue is starting to creep in as the adrenaline drains away. “How exactly are we both supposed to ride that thing?”

Justin gestures at a pair of pegs on the back wheel. “Stand on those,” he instructs as though it should be obvious, “then just hang on.”

Clay considers his options and sighs. It takes him a moment to balance on the metal pegs, and he fists his hands in the fabric of Justin’s jacket unsteadily.

“Nah, you’re gonna fall off. Wrap your arms around my torso. Like you’re my backpack,” the other boy says. Clay obliges grudgingly, glad Justin can’t see the embarrassed flush on his face. He feels ridiculous.

“Alright, Backpack!” Justin shouts, taking off out of nowhere. Clay grips him tighter as they wobble out and start to pick up speed, zipping out of the alleyway and down the slope of a deserted side street.

The night air is cool around them, city muted at such a late hour. There’s only the whir of the wheels and Justin’s pedaling, the warmth of his back against Clay’s chest. Fitfully, the last of the panic attack ebbs away.

He’d had them in Crestmont too; horrible stretches where he’d locked himself in his room or a school bathroom to sweat and gasp for what felt like hours. He’d been alone then, had hidden away with a sense of shame. 

Clay doesn’t feel alone now. Not with Jess who is wry and funny, who let him stay when there was nowhere else to go. Or with Tyler and his shy smiles, and the pictures he takes when he thinks none of them are looking.

Or Justin. This strange mercurial boy who smiles like he isn't afraid of anything and holds Clay’s shoulder and looks at him like he means something. Who has no past, no future, and doesn't care. 

He lets out a laugh like a bell as the bike bounces over a pothole and cycles faster. The wind whips around them and, for a moment, it feels like there's nothing else.

\------------

They leave on Clay’s 14th day in Oakland.

It’s a lazy late Sunday afternoon when Tyler comes jogging back to the squat. He’s been out for hours, which isn’t unusual, but the intense expression on his face is. Jess and Clay put their books down from a makeshift nest of sleeping bags, watching as he rouses Justin from a half-nap. 

“I was just scouting the yard,” he tells them. “If we want an easy ride, we should head to the catch-out spot. A train with a ton of short stackers just pulled in. I don’t know how long we have before it heads out again, so we should hurry.” Wasting no time, he begins to roll up his sleeping bag.

“You’re sure it’s going north?” Justin asks, alert now.

Tyler nods. “One of the workers who’s seen me taking pictures gave me a tip. This week’s going to be cold, too, so now’s the best time to get ahead of it.”

“Sounds good,” Jess says, like she understands what any of this means. She and Justin share a look before they start putting their scant belongings into bags. Clay tries to put the pieces together in his head, but it makes little sense--not for the first time, he feels like they communicate in a language he only half understands.

“Can someone explain this to me? You’re leaving now?”

“I told you we were hopping out to Portland soon,” Jess says, clapping him on the shoulder. 

Suddenly it starts to click. Clay blinks owlishly and splutters, “What, like hopping a _ freight train_? Do—do people still even do that?”

“Good rule of thumb, Clay: if it’s free, people do it,” she replies, pulling clothes from the line.

“You’re coming with us, right?” Justin shrugs his pack over his shoulders. He stops to look at Clay, eyes bright and intent. “You should.

Hannah’s leaning against a support beam. “It’s over if you stay. Don’t you want to know how this ends?”

Clay doesn’t know. Portland had seemed far away, some remote idea—he hadn’t considered following them.

“There’s nothing for you in Crestmont. Not right now,” Hannah continues. The words stick somewhere inside his chest. And part of him knows that returning home means that life goes on—that it means exorcising Hannah until she’s only a memory, rote concepts like _ coming to terms _. 

Justin leans down to grab his backpack and thrusts it out like a question. His eyes are very blue, and his cheeks are red because they’re flesh and blood, alive. Clay reaches out and takes it.

\------------

“This seems really fucking illegal,” Clay mutters.

“Shut up and stay close,” Jess hisses, which is all he needs to know that it is, in fact, really fucking illegal.

The sun has begun to set in earnest, its orange and purple light cresting around the trees as they stumble down the side of a gravel ravine. There, beyond the rock and dust, lies a massive train yard with dozens of tracks stretching out around them; the echoing sounds of workers at the far end underscored by a mechanical thrum that seems to permeate the air. He struggles a little under the weight of the gallon of water stuffed in his backpack, and kneels when Tyler beckons them to crouch behind a large electrical box.

He points a finger to one of the longest trains Clay has ever seen; no beginning or end in sight, only crate after metal crate of cargo.

“That’s the one,” he whispers. It lets out a loud whistle, then another. “I didn’t see any bulls around. I think the workers are done preparing it, so we should sneak on soon.“

“It’s moving,” Justin murmurs with an urgency. Sure enough, the wheels shudder and begin to turn with a jerk that ricochets down the line. “Fuck, fuck, we’ll have to hop it on the fly—“

“Now!” Jess cries over the horn as it bellows again, and then she’s taking off with Tyler close behind. Justin fists his hands in Clay’s jacket like a vice and suddenly they’re running too, flying over empty tracks toward the creeping hunk of metal.

The train is slow but picking up speed with every passing second. There’s no time to think. Clay moves as quickly as his legs can carry him with his heart racing, trying not to trip over the rails. Jess and Tyler reach its side just 10 yards ahead: in the car carrier, just at the end of the shipping container, is a gap in the shallow well with a two foot lip. He watches, dazed, as Tyler leaps to grapple onto the utility ladder at its edge before climbing up to disappear out of sight. Jess follows with nearly as much grace.

“We won’t catch up, hop this next one!” Justin hollers over the din. Lungs aching, Clay realizes that he means _ right now, _as in the car catching up to their left. The other boy slows until he’s parallel with the utility ladder—then leaps to it as Jess and Tyler had done, holding tight to the sidebars for just a moment before he pulls himself up and over.

Pure adrenaline surges through Clay as his feet pound the gravel, moving in close until he can see Justin leaning out but the ladder. He’s waving an arm and yelling something. 

Clay doesn’t have to look to know Hannah is beside him, somehow—and he doesn’t have to feel it to know when she presses cold pale hands to the small of his back, because he registers it in the pulse of his blood and the drum of the stone beneath him.

“Come on, man! You have to fucking go for it!” Justin’s voice breaks through the buzzing and the cacophony of the train. Somehow, bursting forth, Clay grabs the rail of the ladder and hops up to it in a singular heave of motion. His feet leave the ground and for one horrible, terrifying second, his sneaker starts to slip—

And Justin’s arms are pulling him to clamber into the car, grip tight enough to bruise. Clay feels his limbs come to rest against hard steel. He’s too dizzy to move for a moment; sucks in air like he never has before with his chest heaving, Justin breathing raggedly too.

He looks around, stunned. They’re hunched in narrow well, the tall metal of the sides the only thing between them and the rushing earth outside.

“What,” Clay gasps over the clanging wheeze of the locomotive, “just happened. Did we—we did, we just—holy shit, holy shit.”

Justin leans back against the side of the well, hair wild with the wind. His knees shake but then so too do his shoulders, and he’s _ laughing_, the kind of laughter that bubbles out without restraint. And maybe it’s hysteria, but it infects Clay too, and suddenly they’re both doubled over with it.

“Congrats, Backpack. You just hopped your first train,” Justin beams, breathless. 

“I’ve never done anything like that in my life. We could have died.” His voice is hoarse and jittery. One wrong move, one snag or misplaced step, and any of them could have been thrown beneath the wheels. He tries to put it out of his mind.

“You did good. It took me forever to work up the guts to hop on the fly like that.”

“Only because I had to!” Clay splutters. “And—what about Jess and Tyler? There’s no way we can get to them from here.”

It gets louder as the locomotive picks up speed, groaning and rattling with what must be the weight of thousands of tons. He’d seen freight trains before, but always from a distance; here, now, it seems impossibly massive and unstoppable. 

“They know the drill. This thing should be in Dunsmuir by tomorrow, and that’s where we’ll link back up.” 

Clay has never heard of the place. Then again, there’s nothing about this that isn’t completely foreign to him. It seems like something out of a Steinbeck novel. 

“What do we do until then?” He half-shouts over the whistling rumble.

“Enjoy the view, dumbass!” Justin throws his arms wide to the landscape that whips by them. 

It's remarkable. The faint skyline of the city grows smaller and smaller, the sun just a golden sliver on the horizon. Clay is overcome by a sense of wonder, of euphoria, at the thundering roar of it all. After so many days in the city, the wide expanse of the sky has an unreality to it. The sense of relief he’d felt in those first few moments on the bus to Oakland, multiplied now.

He watches the sun set until the adrenaline wears off and shaky exhaustion settles in its stead. They eat granola bars and, once it’s completely dark, Justin rolls out their sleeping bags side by side. It’s a tight fit in the long, narrow space, but the stars are like a bright canopy.

“We should get some sleep while we can,” Justin yells over the howl of the wind. “Not comfortable, but you get used to it.”

It’s freezing now that the sun has gone down, and the shielding of the shipping container at their backs isn’t enough to keep the metal flooring from chilling considerably. When Clay crawls into his bag the insulated fabric does little to help, heat seeming to leach out into the ether. He glances across the bottom of the well at Justin, teeth chattering with his head pillowed on his backpack and no less miserable.

Ten minutes pass, then fifteen, and it’s increasingly clear neither of them are managing sleep. He’s close enough that he can hear it when Justin lets out a shivery “fuck it” and climbs out, spreading his bag over Clay’s.

“What are you doing?” 

“We’re gonna be up freezing our asses off all night unless we share,” Justin says simply. Then a hesitance, a shyness: “Is it okay?”

It’s far from a situation he’d ever envisioned himself being in, but he's fucking tired, and it seems almost reasonable. He’s seen _ Naked and Afraid_. “I—yeah, I guess. Just stop letting the cold in,” he mutters gruffly, surprising himself.

There's a moment of cramped maneuvering, a tight squeeze even with Justin’s underfed frame. Miraculously, he manages to zip the bag back up. Clay blinks bewilderedly into the darkness as a leg hooks over his own and a head of soft hair is shoved unceremoniously into the crook of his neck.

“It doesn’t have to be weird,” Justin mumbles. Which is of course ridiculous, because they’re flush together in a single-person sleeping bag. But it’s also undeniably _ warm_. His hair smells like dollar store body soap and the dust kicked up by the train and something else, something familiar.

The last time Clay was this close to another person had been the night of the party, with Hannah. He pushes the thought from his mind and closes his eyes.

\------------

It’s morning when Justin shakes him awake. The sky is bright blue, cloudless, and Clay looks sleepily over the lip of the well to dense forest. The train is slowing as it approaches a bustling train yard, just a tiny scene in the distance. 

A shrill human’s whistle sounds somewhere ahead as if on cue. “That’s Jess and Tyler—we’re hopping out here. Gotta get off before it stops in the yard,” Justin explains. He seems muted now, more withdrawn than he’d been the day before for reasons Clay doesn’t have time to ponder. They pack up their sleeping bags in swift silence, keeping low in the well.

“Why are we getting off while it’s still moving?” Clay asks. Justin shoulders his pack and climbs out onto the ladder, watching the earth slow beneath them.

“Workers would spot us in the yard. Or worse,” he replies. “Anyways, it’s easier to get off than on. Just follow my lead.”

He leans out to monitor the train’s speed and, after a few minutes, motions him to to the edge. Then, with little warning, he jumps from the ladder to the gravel below. Clay steels himself and follows in a nerve wracking leap. He tries to maintain his footing as he hits the ground, dusting himself off when he fails miserably.

There’s movement from the tree-line as Jess appears, waving them over with Tyler in tow. Justin pulls Clay to his feet.

“There you are. We were afraid you idiots would sleep through the stop. Come on, I’m starving.”

They leave the tracks quickly, dodging around an immobile strings of cars to an abandoned utility road. The pass the yard at a safe distance, obscured from the bustle of workers.

“Lots of them don’t care about freight hoppers. It’s supposed to be good luck to have hobos on your train,” Tyler tells him, hanging back. “It’s the bulls you have to watch out for—railroad police, but they’re usually meaner than cops. That’s why Decaf settled down in Portland. Two of them beat him so badly they put him into a coma.”

“That’s...Is he okay? Now, I mean?” Clay’s stomach somersaults at the idea of an arrest; the call he’d have to make to his parents, even a felony. If he isn’t beaten and left for dead, apparently.

“He has a limp, but I guess so,” Tyler shrugs. He takes a picture of Justin and Jess up the road, laughing with each other about something. “His dad’s a sheriff, so he didn’t do time or anything.”

Clay swallows around a dry mouth. “Too late to turn back now,” Hannah supplies somewhere behind them.

\------------

Dunsmuir is self-consciously quaint town framed by dense pine and the Sacramento River. The main road is dotted with picturesque lodges, a cozy general store, and a small coffee shop, all slowly coming alive for the early tourist season.

The local diner looks like it hasn’t been touched since the 50s, outside and in. Checkered floors and red leather booths—even the waitresses wear candy striped uniforms. The land that time forgot, if time tried very hard to forget itself. 

They’d almost blend in as hikers were it not for how ragged and dusty they are after nearly 300 miles in a train car well. A few men cast them dirty looks from a table across the room, but Clay‘s too hungry to care. 

“Lunch is on me,” Jess announces while they flip through the menu. “I have some money left over from my writing gig.”

Clay wants to protest, but the last of his cash is dwindling, and he can’t remember the last time he ate a hot meal. The waitress arrives quickly; a bubbly, overenthusiastic young girl with a ponytail. Her name tag says _ Louise _ with a heart instead of a dot over the _ i. _

“You all look like you could use some food,” she chirps. “What can I get you?”

They return her enthusiasm with their orders, and she giggles at Clay like ‘a cheeseburger and fries, please’ is a funny joke before turning to Justin. “And for you?”

“Just coffee’s fine,” he says. Jess kicks him under the table but his smile doesn’t waver.

“You sure?” the waitress asks. “We make the best grilled cheese in NorCal, swear to god.”

“I’m good, thanks.”

She looks disappointed but collects their menus and strolls off, shooting Clay a flirtatious wink over her shoulder. He tries not to choke on his water.

Jess casts Justin a sour look. “You should eat. We won’t get to Portland before dark.”

“Thanks, mom. Not hungry,” he replies evenly. He’s paler than usual, fingers trembling as they rips at the corner of a packet of sugar.

“Are you getting—you know, sick?” Tyler asks. He says it furtively, like it means something else.

“I said I’m fine. I don’t know what you want,” Justin snaps. He shoves his shaking hands beneath the table, settling abruptly into one of his sullen moods.

“Telling the truth for once in your life wouldn’t hurt,” Jess says coldly. “How long has it been? Ten, twelve hours?”

He glowers in return. “Actually, you know what? I’ll be out back. Gonna get some fucking sun. Let me know when you guys are ready to ditch this stupid town.” With that he slides out of the booth and storms out. Her narrowed eyes follow until the door swings shut with a definitive _ clink. _

Clay can’t help but feel like he’s missed something; suddenly, the dampened mood is palpable. He clears his throat awkwardly. “What was that?”

Tyler, for his part, becomes very preoccupied with his camera. Jess leans back and levels him with a hard stare.

“God, you really are green,” she scoffs, voice tight. “Justin’s a junkie. Opiates. And now he’s dope sick, because he’s a fucking asshole.”

It takes a few seconds for his brain to catch up with what she’s said. When it does, he freezes. Hannah turns to face him in the booth behind Jess and the ends of her hair are wet. She doesn’t say anything—just looks at him, imperious stare doing the talking: _ I don’t know why you’re surprised_.

He scrubs a hand over his face and closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to look at her. It makes sense. The mood swings, the long disappearances and wobbly returns, the evasiveness. But Justin had seemed so _ normal_, too, in so many ways. Clay wonders dimly if someone can be a high-functioning heroin addict.

“Look—I’m sorry,” Jess cuts in. He opens his eyes to her sheepish face, and at least Hannah is gone. “It’s not your fault you didn’t know. He knows not to do it around us. I probably shouldn’t have told you in the first place.”

“Shouldn’t have told me? Are you—why haven’t you _ stopped _ him?” he asks, unable to contain the ire rising in his chest.

“It’s not really that easy.” Tyler mumbles from his corner of the booth. “And he’s been better lately. We all have our problems.”

Clay deflates because doesn’t know what to say. Tries to compose a response because it’s completely absurd; heroin is the big bad wolf, the end-of-the-line drug in the countless videos they’d been made to watch in high school.

“Yeah, well, this is more than a _ problem.” _ People who use heroin die all the time. His mother’s colleagues who work with opiate addicts carry Narcan in their bags. There are evening news stories about it every other week.

“Listen,” Jess says firmly, “it’s nice that you care about Justin. He’s good at making people do that. And if you want to try to be the one to ‘set him straight’, be my guest. But when he slips out in the middle of the night in withdrawal and takes too much, don’t act like _ we’re _ the assholes for not being able to fix shit you barely understand.”

“I don’t ‘care’. I barely know him,” is all Clay bites out. Is ready to keep going when the waitress reappears, trays heavy with food, and he snaps his mouth shut.

She tells them she’s thrown in an extra order of fries _ for the road _ with a conspiratorial wink, and at least the halfheartedness of their gratitude goes over her head. They eat in stilted silence. Mind still racing and appetite gone, Clay forces the sandwich down. Really, he doesn’t know why he’s so upset. Justin isn't his responsibility. He’s known these people for two weeks. 

But there’s a part of him that says it feels much longer than that. Hannah’s has moved to the empty seat now, and he realizes she’s wearing the dress she wore at the party. Burgundy, cotton, with a denim jacket.

“Seems a little hypocritical to me. Justin’s not the one seeing dead people. But hey, here’s your second chance, right? Someone new to fix,” she remarks, every word a knife. It’s easier to tell himself that this Hannah, cruel and incisive, isn’t real when she isn’t right there in front of him.

Clay pushes the plate away and stands with his stomach churning. Has to get out, to get away from her and everything else. The booth is too small. 

“Gonna go find him,” he mutters to no one in particular, and doesn’t look back as he hurries into the dappled sunlight outside.

Finding Justin isn’t hard. Clay slips around to the back of the aluminum-clad diner and there he is: sitting on an old plastic carton, foil and lighter still in hand, and Clay feels stupid all over again. He wonders briefly how many times Justin was high instead of just distant and tired, whether his shifts in mood were just itches for a fix. How much of the person he knows is real and how much isn’t. It feels like a betrayal, which he knows is irrational, but he well past caring.

“He isn’t me,” Hannah says, looking on passively. Clay knows that. Of course he fucking knows.

So he shuts her out and rounds on Justin instead. Watches with a kind of dull satisfaction as his eyes widen in surprise and he straightens, crumpling the foil and throwing it behind a dumpster in an instant.

“Shit, Clay—"

“When were you going to tell me?” He’s properly angry now. At Justin, at this town, at the hundreds of miles between it and his home, at everything waiting for him when he returns. At Hannah, lingering in the periphery, alternately kind and vicious because it is her and it isn’t her_. _

“There’s nothing to tell,” Justin mutters with a sullen sniff, but his eyes shift away and betray a twinge of guilt. He shoves his hands into his pockets. At least he knows better than to deny it.

“We’re traveling together. Don’t you think I deserve to know?” Clay snaps. It’s a feeble excuse for his outrage and they both know it, but he can’t exactly say _ I’m worried and I don’t want you to die. _ So he adds, “Jess and Tyler clearly knew. Were you—were you high when we got on the train? Or this morning?”

The other boy’s eyes widen in indignation. “No! No. It’s not… I haven’t used since Oakland. And it’s not like that.”

Hannah’s eyes dance with amusement. “Come on, Clay. When were you going to tell them about me?”

“Yeah? Then what is it like?” he snaps at Justin, pacing.

“I mean that I’m not getting _ high.” _ He scrubs his hands over his face and lets out a shaky sigh. “I’m just—doing enough to avoid withdrawal. Just smoking it when I have to, no needles or any of that shit. Okay? I’m not proud of it. That’s why I didn’t want you to know.”

His eyes are soft and sad and painfully earnest. Jess calls it the _ puppy dog look_. Clay deflates a little against his better judgement, thoroughly out of his depth.

“Fine. Then why don’t you stop?”

“Trying to. I swear, Clay. I’m gonna get on a methadone program when we get to PDX, taper off the right way,” he says. And for whatever it’s worth, he doesn’t _ seem _ high. The tremor in his hands is gone and he isn’t quite so pale. 

Justin doesn’t have a family; at least, it doesn’t seem like he does. He doesn’t have money or a job or a house. _ I think he’s the only one of us who does this because he doesn’t have something to go back to, _Tyler said once.

“Okay,” Clay mutters. “Just—okay.”

“Okay?” Justin blinks, eyebrows raised. 

“No. I’m not _ okay _ with it, but it’s not like there’s anything I can do.”

“You don’t even know if he’s telling the truth,” Hannah admonishes. “He probably isn’t. Junkies lie. But then, so do you.”

“I mean it. I swear. Don’t worry about me, Backpack. I’m used to taking care of myself.” A hesitant, placating smile.

“Stop calling me that,” Clay grimaces. “This isn’t over, we’re not—“

He freezes as Justin leaps to his feet, suddenly, eyes trained on something over Clay’s shoulder. A shuffling of feet, then—

“What the fuck are you doing back here?”

The voice is gravely and deep, and Clay whips around to see the men who’d been watching them in the diner. They’re bigger than they looked sitting down; not tourists based on their clothing, roughly in their late 30s, bulky like tradesmen.

“We were just leaving,” Clay replies evenly. Better to avoid any kind of altercation, and he grits his teeth hoping Justin knows to play along.

“Is that right?” the man with sandy blonde hair and a patchy beard spits disdainfully. “You know, we’ve got a nice little town here. We’re getting pretty sick of you freaks coming through.”

The man closest to Justin sucks his teeth. “Over in Chico they put together a special citizens’ patrol for dealing with transient types, bums. They took care of that problem real quick.”

“I heard about that,” Justin counters, hackles up now, and Clay tries not to wince. “You mean the violent vigilante _ psychos _ who beat the shit out of people who weren’t bothering anybody?”

That’s all it takes—the man jumps forward and grabs him by the collar of his jacket, Justin flailing and scrabbling as he’s forced into a headlock. Before Clay can even think, a hand circles around his wrist like a vice, followed by a metallic _ click. _

“Knife!” Justin wheezes, and then he sees it. There, in the spare hand of the man grabbing him: an open pocket knife, poised and ready. Clay’s mind races. They aren’t strong enough to take them in a fight, and certainly not barefisted. The back of the diner is secluded, buffered from the street by a line of trees. Nobody would see. Calling for help could work, or it could mean a blade perforating his intestines—

“Let them go.”

Clay sees the barrel of the handgun before he sees Tyler, who clutches it with a frightening calmness. They all freeze. Jess rounds the corner of the building and skids to a halt at the silent scene, eyes wide. 

“Shit,” she breathes, stiffening at the sight of the gun and the knife, “what—“

“It’s okay, Jess,” Tyler interjects evenly. Jerks his eyes in the direction of Justin’s bag by the dumpster. She seems to understand, and begins moving toward it slowly.

The hand encircling Clay’s arm loosens and moves away. The man holding Justin releases him too, and faces his palms forward in the air with his pupils like pinpricks.

“Nobody has to get shot,” he swallows compulsively. “Put that down, kid. You don’t know how to use it.”

Tyler doesn’t budge. He keeps his hands steady and his voice is soft when he says, “Wanna bet?”

The man doesn’t get the chance to answer. Jess takes the chance to dart forward, scooping up Justin’s pack and throwing it to him in a flash. 

“Go!” she shouts. Time resumes at double speed.

Feet responding before his brain, Clay takes off after Jess and Justin faster than he’s ever moved in his life. They skid out from the back of the diner to the street, slowing just enough to make sure Tyler’s close behind—with no time to linger to see if the men are giving chase.

They run, and run, and run for what feels like an eternity. Off of the main street and back onto the unpaved utility road, through the pine forest, until at last they stumble back onto the tracks.

There is a long moment of panting as they catch their breaths behind a large outcropping of rock. Clay bends over his knees to squint back down the tracks, ears pricked for the pounding of feet following them. He collapses onto a downed log when none comes, vision swimming as Justin begins to laugh breathlessly, a little hysterically.

“Jesus, that was close—“

“What the hell,” Jess wheezes. “Since when have you had a _ gun _?”

Tyler is pale now, shaking all over, with no sign of the steady cold stare he’d worn just minutes ago. “This—this whole time, I guess. It isn’t loaded, I-I was bluffing.”

Justin slaps him on the back with a boneless arm. “Give the kid a break. I think he just saved our asses. Didn’t know you had it in you, Ty.”

“Yeah, or they’re sending the cops after us!” she shouts back. “How could you be so _ stupid-_“

“They won’t,” Tyler mumbles dizzily. “One of—one of them pissed himself. If they were gonna call it in, the bulls would already be here. Probably too embarrassed.

Jess lets out a long, quivering sigh as Justin dissolves into another fit of winded laughter. “We’re getting rid of that thing before we get to Portland.”

\------------

They play it safe for an hour in a thicket’s clearing well away from the tracks. Jess keeps disapproving watch as Tyler buries the handgun beneath a stone, and the four of them wait in tentative silence for the sound of distant police or a ride out. Justin seems to be the only one who isn’t still shaken; he stretches out, idly doodling crude cartoons in the sandy dirt with a stick.

Watching him draw in a kind of delirious stupor, Clay wonders what it would be like to be ready for anything, to let fear roll off him like water on a duck’s back. He wonders if it comes with having nothing to lose. 

“Everybody has something to lose,” Hannah says, wandering around the edge of their makeshift camp. “Otherwise you die.”

The sun is high when they hear the long horn of a train preparing to depart. Clay follows them up the tracks and to the far edge of the yard, watching from a concealed position as workers check the long string of cars. 

“That’s the one,” Tyler whispers. He points to an empty boxcar with a door left open and adds, “We’ll have to hop it before the train departs. Hang tight in the back until it’s out of the yard.” 

The slip carefully down to the edge when the workers are far enough out of sight. It’s a much higher platform than the well cars, with no ladder; Justin helps hoist Clay up when his exhausted legs won’t cooperate. The interior is covered in a gritty layer of rust and dirt, and Jess herds them into corner farthest from the door.

Twenty minutes pass in mouselike silence. Once, a pair of boots crunch past on gravel, and none of them even breathes. Then, after what feels like an eternity, the train shudders into movement. When the sounds of the rail yard fade into the wind, everyone seems to breathe a collective sigh of relief. 

It’s a slower train than the last, which makes it easier to hear; Tyler pulls out his camera and takes photographs from the doorway. He points out landmarks as they pass them; the Sacramento river rushing alongside the tracks, the white cap of Mount Shasta looming beyond a placid lake.

Eventually the scenery opens up to a vast sage chaparral of rolling hills. The boxcar is larger and more comfortable than the narrow wells of the shopping crate carrier had been, and they stretch out as the sun begins to go down. Tyler dozes. It isn’t long before Jess drifts off too, head pillowed on Justin’s lap, any animosity between them dissolved now.

Clay stays by the doorway despite the cold, even hangs his legs over the edge. If he leans forward just enough he can see the rest of the train laid out on the tracks behind them. It takes on an almost organic quality in the dim light, snakelike. Once, when he was a kid, Clay’s father told an Aboriginal myth in place of a bedtime story: something about an enormous god-serpent, whose movements carved out the mountains and the rivers. A vague twinge of homesickness curls in his chest.

“I wouldn’t hang your legs out like that if you don’t wanna lose them,” Justin says. He gently extricates himself from Jess and pads over to sit beside Clay, who pulls his limbs up quickly.

“Noted.”

The other boy squints out at the pale dimming sky and its carpet of narrow cedar silhouettes. “We should be crossing into Oregon soon, if we haven't already,” he observes. 

Clay nods wordlessly. There’s a tiny white farmhouse on a distant hillside with the lights on—the first sign of exterior life in what feels like hours.

“Hey,” Justin says. The same timbre as last night, crouched by the sleeping bag; hesitant and nervous. “Are we... Are we cool?”

Dimly, Clay realizes this is important to Justin. He doesn’t know what to make of it. But he remembers the look of steadfast dedication in Justin’s eyes the night of the show, in the bathroom. How easily he’d given it. It seems like a poor method of self preservation—blind trust. Clay can count the people he trusts on one hand, and two of them are dead. 

“I don’t know,” he replies honestly, but it lacks heat. “It’s messed up, Justin. But if you’re really trying to stop using, I have no choice but to take you at your word. For now.”

“I am. Honest.” He doesn’t break eye contact, which must be good for something. Then, “Did Jess tell you?”

“Yeah. Don’t be mad at her.”

Justin pulls the sleeves of his sweater down over his thumbs and shrugs. “I don’t think I know how. Not with Jess, anyways.”

“Were you and her ever,” he pauses, a little embarrassed, “you know, a thing?”

It hasn’t been hard to notice the intensity of their relationship. Jess is vocal about her stance on love and sex; about how monogamy is a patriarchal, capitalist scam, a construct—her favorite word—to make people think they can own one another. But she looks at Justin in a way she doesn’t look at anybody else, even if she’d never admit it.

Justin just shoots him an infuriatingly wry smirk. He stretches out over the dusty metal floor on his side, resting his chin on his hand like they’re girls at a sleepover. “Why, you _ like _ her?”

“No!” Clay scoffs. “I mean, obviously I like her. But not like that. You know what—never mind.” 

He laughs like he always does—loud and easy. “Calm down, I’m messing with you. Yeah, we had a thing once, back when we first met. Better off as friends.”

_ He’s good at making people do that, _ Jess said in the diner, but she’s the same. They make sense. Buoyed by an effortless charisma, an innate confidence like a magnetic pull. Clay wonders what it’s like. It had been that way with Jeff, too.

“When did you meet?” What he wants to ask is _ how did you meet _, but Clay’s been with them long enough to know that some stories have to be offered voluntarily. And that asking Justin anything and expecting a straightforward answer is more or less a crapshoot.

“About a year and a half ago, I think? She was the first person on the road who I trusted. I was really bad when I met her, really fucked, and she helped me clean up. Probably saved my life. I’d do anything for her.” The speed with which Justin can careen from a goofy smile to a look of dead seriousness is kind of amazing. “Why?” he asks, not guarded but curious.

“Just wondering, I guess. You seem like you’ve known each other forever.” 

“That’s because street months are like years everywhere else.” He says it so simply, eyes cast out into the darkness, and it makes more sense than Clay’s willing to admit.

Hannah’s eyes meet his from her spot at the far end of the boxcar, and this time they aren't unkind. The rattle is loud but he can still hear her when she says, “It’s not a betrayal to let other people in, you know.”

“What are you looking at?” Justin asks.

“Nothing. Thinking,” he answers quickly, and when he blinks she’s gone.

“You think too much, dude.” He leans to rest against his backpack and studies Clay with a smile that’s soft around the edges. “But I’m glad that guy didn’t stab you. And it’s cool you came with us.”

Clay can’t come up with a solid retort to that. He looks away and says, “Thanks.”

\------------

They arrive well after nightfall, holing up in the back of the boxcar until they’re sure the section of tracks is empty. The darkness makes vacating the train yard without being spotted easier; Jess leads the way, climbing through a split fence that lets out into the parking lot of a closed electronics store. 

It’s a relatively desolate area, with little of the city to see; Clay can just make out a bridge and a sliver of the Willamette river. The air is colder and crisper than it had been in Oakland and he prays they’re not sleeping in another abandoned factory. Across the lot, an ancient Oldsmobile hums to life and rolls up to the curb.

“I called Decaf before we left Dunsmuir—he’s our ride,” Jess says, savings It looks like it‘s barely street legal, and Clay’s pretty sure there’s duct tape on the fender. The kind of car his mother would call a _ screaming metal death trap. _

The window creaks down and a boy with short bleached hair sticks his head out. “Took you long enough,” he deadpans. The septum ring in his nose makes him look like a particularly skinny bull. He goes beet red when Jess leans down to peck him on the cheek. 

“We got held up at our last stop,” she explains as they load their backpacks into the trunk. Jess takes shotgun and Clay, Tyler, and Justin pile into the back. “Actually, we sort of did the holding up. But that’s a story for later.”

The blonde kid pulls the car out of the lot. He glances up into the rearview mirror to link eyes with Clay. “So, who the fuck is this? You didn’t mention anything about a fourth person."

“That’s Clay,” Jess says, resting a foot up on the dashboard. “He’s a friend, so be nice_. _Clay, this is Alex. Occasionally known as Decaf. He drinks a lot of coffee, which I’m sure you can tell by his exuberant personality.”

Alex scoffs. “Ha-ha.”

“Nice to meet you,” Clay pipes up. The warmth of the car is already doing its best to lull him to sleep; he hadn’t realized how cold the boxcar had really been.

“Yeah,” Alex replies tonelessly, casting a look at Jess. “He can stay if you vouch for him, but we’re trying to hold on to this squat as long as we can. It’s really fucking nice. The neighbor’s a cool old hippie, doesn’t care that we’re not supposed to be there and doesn’t freak out when we have parties. We’ve put a lot of work into it.”

Justin grins and sticks his head out the window like a dog. “Clay’s a goody two shoes. He’ll behave.”

“That means you too, Justin,” Alex fires back. “This isn’t some flophouse or whatever, we have actual rules. Clean up your shit, share food, help out, no hard drugs. If you can manage that, you can stay as long as you want.”

Clay glances at Justin. He just stares at the passing trees and buildings with a dopey smile.

\------------

The squat is, blissfully, nothing like the disused factory in Oakland. 

It’s nestled at the end of a quiet block of small bungalows. While the neighborhood has clearly seen better days—it’s rugged and more than a few houses are boarded up—it’s far from horrible. 

The house itself is a small, narrow two-story. From the street it just looks like any slightly rundown row-home, and there are _actual_ _lights_ on inside. Which means no more fire hazard candles and spotty flashlights. When they walk up to the door Clay notices that the exterior is freshly painted.

The inside isn’t exactly domestic—the furniture has clearly been plucked from curbsides, and the walls are adorned with show flyers and spray painted bedsheets and a collection of some of the most bizarre thrift store art he’s ever seen. But it’s decidedly free of dust or grime and _ mostly _ free of empty beer cans. After two weeks in Oakland and two days in frigid trains, it’s as close to heaven as Clay can imagine.

“You guys got electricity turned on?” Justin marvels as they get their bearings.

“Yeah. We had to hassle the power company for weeks, but they can’t legally turn us away. Same with the water,” Alex says, shrugging out of his jacket. “Come on, I think everybody’s still up—you should meet them.”

He leads them to the living room, where a group of people are sitting around on a pair of worn chartreuse couches. Alex makes the perfunctory introductions: Sherri (a beautiful girl with bright eyes and immaculate braids), Charlie (a smiley blonde kid who’d look more at home at a baseball game), Skye (a heavily tattooed girl with finely-tuned ‘don’t fuck with me’ vibes), and Tony (who looks entirely too put-together to be a squatter). Clay decides he’ll work on remembering their names tomorrow, and tries not to look too eager when Alex offers to show them the sleeping arrangements.

They trudge, exhausted, up a creaky flight of stairs. “I’m in the attic space,” Alex explains. “Tyler, you can bunk with Charlie. Justin and Clay can have the open room at the end of the hall. Jess, sleep wherever: Skye and Sherri, the couch, or with the boys. Or with me—if you, uh, want to.”

“I would _ love _ some girl energy, thank you,” she grins. Alex does a noble job of concealing his disappointment as he helps with her bag.

For what it is, the room at the end of the hall is a welcome sight. It isn’t large or elaborate: just a mattress covered by a thin quilt on the floor, a signed up dresser, and a tiny closet. But there’s a window (with actual glass, this time) that lets out onto a portion of the back roof, and what looks like a small garden down below. It could almost pass as quaint. Justin flops onto the mattress and splays out with a contented sigh.

“This is dope. I knew Portland was a good idea.”

“Don’t you think we should flip a coin or something?” Clay asks, exasperated.

“Huh?”

“For the bed."

“Dude, this thing is huge. We can both fit,” he says and, as if to demonstrate, scoots up against the wall. “I promise not to spoon you, but no way am I sleeping on the ground again if I don’t have to.”

He’s too tired to object, and they’ve already shared a sleeping bag. “Ugh. Fine. At least take off your boots—they’re disgusting.”

Justin mumbles something that sounds like _ yes, __sergeant_, and begins to half-heartedly toe off his shoes. By the time Clay strips out of his dust-covered clothes and into sweatpants, the taller boy is out—one boot still half-on. 

Clay pulls it off with a sigh that isn’t quite grudging, and places the pair by the closet. He crawls onto the mattress and lays out their sleeping bags out as blankets, pillowing his head on a spare t-shirt. 

The past 48 hours weigh his eyelids down. Every second of it seems unfathomable now. He’s 600 miles from home, but it feels even farther than that. Too far and not far enough. And he wonders if this—this strange, in-between world he’s stumbled into—is realer than anything else. Or if it’s the other way around, or how far he’ll have to go before he knows the difference. _ Don’t you want to know how this ends? _

Justin snores softly in his sleep. Between the softness of the mattress and the quiet warmth of the house, Clay finds he doesn’t mind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next chapter: Clay gets to know his new housemates. There’s a party, a waterfall, and a warning.
> 
> Change of scenery! And the addition of the rest of the characters. Zach and Bryce will appear in a coda/one-shot after this storyline is complete. Feel like I should also note that freight hopping is *extremely* illegal and dangerous. Squatting is also illegal and unsafe. This story includes an oversimplified and fairly inaccurate portrayal of both for the sake of fiction.
> 
> As usual, comments and feedback are thoroughly appreciated. <3 Thank you for reading.


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